DSD files - no sound

Help and Support Help
1

Hi,

I tried to playback a DSD file (dff extension) on my RaspPi B with volumio 1.41 and Iqaudio DAC. While in the playback tab of the web UI everything seems fine (file type was correctly recognized) I still get no sound. Other formats like FLAC, WAV, MP3 are fine no matter which sampling frequency or bit rate they are.
Of course DSD support is switched on in vomlumio settings.

Any ideas?

BR

2

The problem is that MPD as of now supports DSD only over USB…
If you want to play DSD files you can alsa-dsd tool: to install:

wget http://repo.volumio.org/apt/pool/main/a/alsa-dsd/alsa-dsd_1-1_armhf.deb sudo dpkg -i alsa-dsd_1-1_armhf.deb

And play with

alsa-dsd-player namefile

Not the most user-friendly way as you need to dig into command line. I will integrate this sometime in the distro…

3

Michelangelo, thanks for your reply.

I just tried different file formats. 99,9999% of the files I’m playing are FLAC. In future with increasing availablility DSD might become more interesting. So far it was just a test.

BR

4

I think there are roughly 6000 albums that were released on SACD that are potentially all DSD-able. Most of these are jazz and classical. Some smaller music companies are producing new downloadable DSD music. And converting analog source material. Sony are certainly pushing the format hard. An hour of DSD64 takes up around 2.5gb and of DSD128 5gb.
The main issue is that music studios who want to issue DSD material, can’t (easily) mix on DSD, unless they have specialised desks and Sonoma or Pyramix workstations. Sony are loaning out such kit to studios who want it for free.
Generally these days, most studios who do want to issue new DSD material, use systems that take a DSD (effectively analog ) 1 bit stream from the given channel, convert to hi-quality PCM - mix, edit, sample and so on, and then transcode back to DSD.

I can’t help thinking that if you have analog master tapes, or an SACD DSX archive file or the original SACD source files then converting to DSD makes some kind of sense. Especially as people are saying it sounds amazing. But the logic of taking any hi quality PCM source (even if recorded in DSD) and converting it back to DSD escapes me.
The ‘path shorting’ sigma-delta modulation playback path issue notwithstanding. Google ‘DSD vs PCM’ for the full story.

5

i can’t install it…i got the error message as follow. How to fix it? Thanks

root@volumio:~# wget repo.volumio.org/apt/pool/main/a … _armhf.deb
–2014-10-18 16:36:41-- repo.volumio.org/apt/pool/main/a … _armhf.deb
Resolving repo.volumio.org (repo.volumio.org)… 80.69.77.195
Connecting to repo.volumio.org (repo.volumio.org)|80.69.77.195|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 500 Internal Server Error
2014-10-18 16:36:41 ERROR 500: Internal Server Error.

6

I have the same issue. Almost no DSD sound. Just static and very low output.
Also cannot download the file. Nothing in the directory path with the name alsa-dsd_1-1_armhf.deb.

Vince